Contributions

From My Flickr

January 29, 2004

John Kearney, a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has wrote an Op-Ed article urging that US media should stop calling Allah "Allah", and just use the name "God" to signify that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same deity.

Kearney asserts:

"There is no god but God" is the first of Islam's five pillars. It is Muhammad's refutation of polytheism. Yet to today's non-Muslims, the locution "there is no God but Allah" reads as an affront, a declaration that inflammatory Allah trumps the Biblical God. This journalistic rendition distorts the meaning of the Muslim confession of faith.

The Arabic word for god is ilaah and God is Allah. This has nothing to do with religion. Allah is clearly stated in the Koran to be the name of ilaah, just as Yahweh is the name of God (Eli) in the Torah. The word for God in Greek and Latin is derived from the word for Zeus.